faceless007 said:
That may be how it was defined 150 years ago, but it's not the meaning today in the West. I have to assume the words in the survey are used according to their contemporary meaning with which I'm familiar, or else I don't know how to answer any of the questions. I'm pretty sure even die-hard leftists today don't think "free market" means "free from huge corporations" or they would call themselves free-marketeers as well. But they don't, so no one will interpret the question that way.
As I see it, markets controlled by monopolies or cartels are not free. Thus to have a free market, there must be some kind of social agreement on the rules to prevent such a situation. If we go further I'd go on and state that no markets are just a limited human made social constructs with inherent boundaries, that's why the definition of "free market" is not and should not be fixed. Definitions change and it's not a question of how the contemporary dictionaries define the word but how do you see it.
faceless007 said:
But that's my point: these questions can't mean "whatever I want" for the survey to be meaningful. Either words have objective meaning or they don't. If they do then the survey can interpret my responses, but if not then there's no way to know what I'm actually thinking about when responding to such vague wording. If it wants to ask me what I think about nations, it should use that word.
No no no, you miss the point completely. It's a question if you see world should be of independent groups, however they are composed (be it family units, tribes, ethnic groups, national states, nations, or indeed whatever kind of construct you can think) minding their own business. Or if you see the need for higher levels of hierarchy that binds groups together under mutual agreements, alliances, federations, international organisations etc.
Have you ever heard people talking about "our people" or "your people"? We are talking about these groups of "our people".
faceless007 said:
Then they're morons. And yes, morons exist, but I'm not aware of any proven correlation between being a moron and political beliefs. (Much as I would like to believe that anyone to the right of me is one.)
Then you agree with the question that it's natural for a child to keep some secrets from parents. They have a right to keep them and parent's shouldn't force children to tell.
faceless007 said:
But that's still an empirical question of political science, best answered by people who study how these institutions work. That's separate from the question of whether one prefers one-party government (Also, I'd guess most people prefer one-party when their party is in power and divided when not.)
So would you be willing to consider one party system with party of your choise in order to get their policies implemented efficiently?
Some of these questions are masked and for a reason. People are many times preconditioned to respond to various notions in some manner:
There's a group in Finland that wants to this country to be just for ethnic Finns, want to separate Finland from EU, UN and cut other ties to other nations. They want all immigrants (and non ethnic Finns, even the ethnic minorities that have lived here forever) out. But they still don't consider themselves racist. The word just has a bad stigma to it.
Same goes for the one-party system, it has a bad ring to it because most of us are raised in a land with multi-party systems. We are taught to shun the idea of a system with only one party outright but one might find some implications of such a system appealing.
